JANUARY /FEBRUARY 2019 | MIND.SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.

COM

DING
INCLU

AN APP THAT
PREDICTS HOW
YOU’LL FEEL
THE JOYFUL
SOUNDS OF
DEATH METAL
NEED
PURPOSE?

ANTAGONISTS
IGNORE YOUR
PASSIONS

AND THE
PEOPLE WHO
LOVE THEM
They’re aggressive.
They retaliate.
And yet they get
elected as leaders
and excel in society.
Why?

WITH COVERAGE FROM

FROM
THE
EDITOR

Your Opinion Matters!

Help shape the future
of this digital magazine.
Let us know what you
think of the stories within
these pages by emailing us:
LIZ TORMES

editors@sciam.com.

Mean Guys Finish First

Many of us could easily name someone in the public eye (or even our private circle) whose aggressive
personality only seems to get them more ahead in life. Do nice guys (and gals) truly finish last? Scientific
American columnist Scott Barry Kaufman digs into this question in “The Personality Trait That Is Ripping
America (and the World) Apart,” especially as it pertains to political beliefs. It turns out that highly antago-
nistic leaders have a special ability to fire up certain groups of people who share some of those antagonis-
tic personality tendencies. Talk about screaming into the echo chamber.
Elsewhere in this issue, psychologists are developing apps that, they claim, can predict severe mood
crashes—especially important for patients suffering from depression, as Matt Kaplan reports in “Happy,
with a 20 Percent Chance of Sadness.” And Cindi May, professor of psychology at the College of Charles-
ton, makes the case that rather than follow our passions down one career path, we should invest in differ-
ent interests and multiple fields (see “Life Advice: Don’t Follow Your Passion”). As always, we welcome
your feedback. Enjoy!
On the Cover
Andrea Gawrylewski They're aggressive.
Collections Editor
They retaliate.
editors@sciam.com
And yet they get
elected as leaders
and excel in society.

GETTY IMAGES
Why?
 WHAT’S January / February 2019
Volume 30 • Number 1

INSIDE
GETTY IMAGES

NEWS
4.

GETTY IMAGES
“Stress Hormone”
Cortisol Linked to Early
Toll on Thinking Ability
Brain changes, visible FEATURES
on scans, are also 13.
associated with The Personality Trait That Is Ripping America
Alzheimer’s precursors (and the World) Apart
6. People who are antagonistic resonate more
Yes, Violent Video with populist messages
Games Trigger 17.
Aggression, but Happy, with a 20 Percent Chance of Sadness
Debate Lingers Researchers are developing wristbands and apps
A study tries to find
GERD ALTMANN PIXABAY

to predict moods—but the technology has

whether slaughtering pitfalls as well as promise
zombies with a virtual 21.
assault weapon Dissecting the Bloodthirsty Bliss
translates into of Death Metal
misbehavior when Fans of this violent music report feelings of
a teenager returns 11. OPINION transcendence and positive emotions;
to reality Neuroscience Discovers 31. psychologists want to learn why
8. Power of “Lesion There’s Nothing Wrong with 24.
How Accurate Are Network Mapping” Being a Luddite Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Can Be
Personality Tests? A new technique is It enables critical reflection and evaluation Contagious
Precious few personality reviving the century-old of the technological world we’re building PTSD sometimes spreads from trauma victims to
assessments are known study of brain lesions 34. the people who care for them, including rescue
to be reliable, and and revealing surprising Life Advice: Don’t Find Your Passion workers, spouses and even therapists
researchers say their things about neurologi- Study suggests meaningful work can be 27.
use outside academia cal disorders like Parkin- something you grow into, not something The New Champions of Illusion
is debatable son’s disease you discover An excerpt from a new book on visual illusions

3
NEWS

“Stress Hormone”
Cortisol Linked to
Early Toll on
Thinking Ability
Brain changes, visible on scans,
are also associated with
Alzheimer’s precursors

THE STRESSES OF everyday life may

start taking a toll on the brain in
relatively early middle age, new
research shows. The study of more
than 2,000 people, most of them in
their 40s, found those with the
highest levels of the stress-related

FRANCESCO SAMBATI GETTY IMAGES

hormone cortisol performed worse
on tests of memory, organization,
visual perception and attention.
Higher cortisol levels, measured in
subjects’ blood, were also found to
be associated with physical changes
in the brain that are often seen as
precursors to Alzheimer’s disease
and other forms of dementia,
according to the study published in
October in Neurology.
The link between high cortisol
levels and low performance was
particularly strong for women, the
study found. But it remains unclear
whether women in midlife are under
more stress than men or simply
more likely to have their stress
manifested in higher cortisol levels,
says lead researcher Sudha Ses-
hadri. A professor of neurology, she

4
 NEWS
splits her time between Boston
University and the University of
Texas Health Science Center at San
Antonio, where she is the founding
director of the Glenn Biggs Institute
for Alzheimer's & Neurodegenera-
tive Diseases.
Working on the study “made me
more stressed about not being less
stressed,” Seshadri says, laughing.
But, she adds, the bottom line is
serious: “An important message to
myself and others is that when
challenges come our way, getting
frustrated is very counterproduc-
tive—not just to achieving our aims
but perhaps to our capacity to be
productive.”
The study is the largest of its kind
to look at these factors and tightens
the link between cortisol, midlife
stress and brain changes, says
Pierre Fayad, medical director of the
Nebraska Stroke Center at the
University of Nebraska Medical
Center, who was not involved in the
new research. “It confirms some of
the previous suspicions,” he says.
“Because of its quality, it gives a lot
more credibility.”
Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist
and cortisol expert at the Rockefel-
ler University, who also was not part
Working on the study “made me more stressed
about not being less stressed.”—Sudha Seshadri
of the study, says he found it “frankly
remarkable.” Cortisol, he notes, is
necessary for life—so it is obviously
not all bad. But stress can lead
people to potentially problematic
behaviors such as smoking, drinking
and eating unhealthy food. “Cortisol is
itself the tip of the iceberg of things
that are going on in a person’s life
and a person’s body,” he says.
The new research included
volunteers from the Framingham
Heart Study, a 70-year-old study of
residents from a Boston suburb.
Researchers are now studying the
grandchildren of the original
participants, most of whom were
white, middle class and suburban,
Seshadri says. Although the scien-
tists did not ask participants what
kinds of specific stresses they were
under on the day their blood was
drawn, she says the volunteers were
able to come in for a three-to
four-hour examination—so “you
would say they were at a reasonably
stable point in their life.”
Yet even these relatively young
and apparently well-off people
showed signs of brain changes,
both in brain scans and in their
performance. “This is the range of
stress that a group of average
Americans would experience,”
Seshadri says. The highest cortisol
levels were associated with changes
that could be seen on an MRI scan
of the brain, the study found.
Cortisol does not distinguish
between physical and mental stress,
so some of the people with high
levels might have had physical
illnesses such as diabetes that
drove up their cortisol levels,
Seshadri says. It is also possible
levels of the hormone might spike in
people’s blood if they are already
undergoing brain changes—that is,
the elevated cortisol could be the
result of the changes rather than
their cause—she says. But she
thinks this is unlikely because the
trial participants were so young.
Each subject’s cortisol level was
measured only once (in the morn-
ing), so the measurements do not
reflect changes over time or varia-
tions throughout the day, she notes.
The volunteers were given tasks
such as copying a shape they were
shown or being asked to repeat a
story they had been told 20 minutes
earlier. The differences in perfor-
mance were subtle, Seshadri says.
She could not immediately tell
whether subjects had higher or
lower cortisol levels based on how
well they carried out the tasks. “It
was more that in terms of group
averages there was a real differ-
ence,” she explains.
Earlier research has shown
weaker-than-average performances
on tests like these are associated
with a higher risk of dementia
5
 NEWS
decades later, and Seshadri says
high stress levels in midlife might be
one of many factors that contribute
to dementia. Understanding that link
might offer a potential opportunity
to reduce risk—but she cautions
research has not yet shown conclu-
sively that lowering cortisol levels
will reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.
Other research has shown cortisol
levels can be reduced with adequate
sleep, exercise, socializing and
relaxing mental activities such as
meditation. “There are a number of
intriguing, fairly simple things that
have been shown to change these
levels,” Seshadri says. “But whether
they will in turn translate into better
preservation of the brain is some-
thing that can only be determined in
a clinical trial.”
Rockefeller University’s McEwen
says other research suggests it is
never too late to adopt a healthier
lifestyle by taking steps like reduc-
ing stress, exercising regularly,
eating a healthy diet, getting
enough good-quality sleep and
finding meaning in one’s life. “The
life course is a one-way street,” he
says. But “the brain does have the
capacity for repairing.”
—Karen Weintraub
Yes, Violent Video
Games Trigger
Aggression, but
Debate Lingers
A study tries to find whether
slaughtering zombies with a virtual
assault weapon translates into
misbehavior when a teenager
returns to reality
INTUITIVELY, IT MAKES SENSE. Splatter-
house and Postal 2 would serve as
virtual training sessions for teens,
encouraging them to act out in ways
that mimic game-related violence.
But many studies have failed to find
a clear connection between violent cents and preteens. Yet debate is by has serious flaws in that, among
game play and belligerent behavior, no means over. Whereas the analy- other things, it measures the fre-
and the controversy over whether sis was undertaken to help settle quency of aggressive thoughts or
the shoot-‘em-up world transfers to the science on the issue, research- language rather than physically
real life has persisted for years. A ers still disagree on the real-world aggressive behaviors like hitting or
new study published on October 1 significance of the findings. pushing, which have more real-world
in the Proceedings of the National This new analysis attempted to relevance.
Academy of Sciences USA tries to navigate through the minefield of Jay Hull, a social psychologist at
resolve the controversy by weighing conflicting research. Many studies Dartmouth College and a co-author
the findings of two dozen studies on find gaming associated with increas- on the new paper, has never been
the topic. es in aggression, but others identify convinced by the critiques that have
GETTY IMAGES
The meta-analysis does tie violent no such link. A small but vocal cadre disparaged purported ties between
video games to a small increase in of researchers have argued much of gaming and aggression. “I just kept
physical aggression among adoles- the work implicating video games reading, over and over again, [these]
6
 NEWS
criticisms of the literature and going,
‘That’s just not true,’” he says. So he
and his colleagues designed the
new meta-analysis to address these
criticisms head-on and determine if
they had merit.
Hull and his colleagues pooled
data from 24 studies that had been
selected to avoid some of the
criticisms leveled at earlier work.
They only included research that
measured the relationship between
violent video game use and overt
physical aggression. They also
limited their analysis to studies that
statistically controlled for several
factors that could influence the
relationship between gaming and
subsequent behavior, such as age
and baseline aggressive behavior.
Even with these constraints, their
analysis found kids who played
violent video games did become
more aggressive over time. But the
changes in behavior were not big.
“According to traditional ways of
looking at these numbers, it’s not a
large effect—I would say it’s relatively
small,” he says. But it’s “statistically
reliable—it’s not by chance and not
inconsequential.”
Their findings mesh with a 2015
literature review conducted by the
It may instead be that the relationship between
gaming and aggression is a statistical artifact
caused by lingering flaws in study design.
American Psychological Association,
which concluded violent video games
worsen aggressive behavior in older
children, adolescents and young
adults. Together, Hull’s meta-analysis
and the APA report help give clarity
to the existing body of research, says
Douglas Gentile, a developmental
psychologist at Iowa State University,
who was not involved in conducting
the meta-analysis. “Media violence is
one risk factor for aggression,” he
says. “It's not the biggest, it’s also not
the smallest, but it’s worth paying
attention to.”
Yet researchers who have been
critical of links between games and
violence contend Hull’s meta-analy-
sis does not settle the issue. “They
don’t find much. They just try to
make it sound like they do,” says
Christopher Ferguson, a psychologist
at Stetson University in Florida, who
has published papers questioning
the link between violent video games
and aggression.
Ferguson argues the degree to
which video game use increases
aggression in Hull’s analysis—what is
known in psychology as the estimat-
ed “effect size”—is so small as to be
essentially meaningless. After
statistically controlling for several
other factors, the meta-analysis
reported an effect size of 0.08, which
suggests that violent video games
account for less than one percent of
the variation in aggressive behavior
among U.S. teens and pre-teens—if,
in fact, there is a cause-and-effect
relationship between game play and
hostile actions. It may instead be that
the relationship between gaming and
aggression is a statistical artifact
caused by lingering flaws in study
design, Ferguson says.
Johannes Breuer, a psychologist at
GESIS–Leibniz Institute for the
Social Sciences in Germany, agrees,
noting that according to “a common
rule of thumb in psychological
research,” effect sizes below 0.1 are
“considered trivial.” He adds me-
ta-analyses are only as valid as the
studies included in them, and that
work on the issue has been plagued
by methodological problems. For one
thing, studies vary in terms of the
criteria they use to determine if a
video game is violent or not. By some
measures, the Super Mario Bros.
games would be considered violent,
but by others not. Studies, too, often
7
 NEWS

rely on subjects self-reporting their warped,” he notes.

own aggressive acts, and they may
not do so accurately. “All of this is not
to say that the results of this me-
ta-analysis are not valid,” he says. “But
things like this need to be kept in
mind when interpreting the findings
and discussing their meaning.”
Hull says, however, that the effect
size his team found still has real-
world significance. An analysis of one
of his earlier studies, which reported a
similar estimated effect size of 0.083,
found playing violent video games
was linked with almost double the
risk that kids would be sent to the
school principal’s office for fighting.
The study began by taking a group of
children who hadn’t been dispatched
to the principal in the previous month
and then tracked them for a
subsequent eight months. It found 4.8
percent of kids who reported only
rarely playing violent video games
were sent to the principal’s office at
least once during that period
compared with 9 percent who
Hull and his colleagues also found
evidence ethnicity shapes the
relationship between violent video
games and aggression. White players
seem more susceptible to the games'
putative effects on behavior than do
Hispanic and Asian players. Hull isn’t
sure why, but he suspects the games'
varying impact relates to how much
kids are influenced by the norms of
American culture, which, he says, are
rooted in rugged individualism and a
warriorlike mentality that may incite
video game players to identify with
aggressors rather than victims. It
might “dampen sympathy toward
their virtual victims,” he and his
co-authors wrote, “with consequenc-
es for their values and behavior they are procrastinators at the core.
outside the game.” How Accurate Are Other questionnaires, developed and
Social scientists will, no doubt, sold as tools to help people hire the
continue to debate the psychological
Personality Tests? right candidate or find love, take
Precious few personality assess-
impacts of killing within the confines themselves more seriously.
ments are known to be reliable, and
of interactive games. In a follow-up The trouble is, if you ask the
researchers say their use outside
paper Hull says he plans to tackle the experts, most of these might not be
academia is debatable
issue of the real-world significance of worth the money. “You should be

TIM ROBBERTS GETTY IMAGES

reported playing violent video games
frequently. Hull theorizes violent
games help kids become more
comfortable with taking risks and
engaging in abnormal behavior. “Their
sense of right and wrong is being
violent game play and hopes it adds
additional clarity. “It’s a knotty issue,”
he notes—and it’s an open question
whether research will ever quell the
controversy.
—Melinda Wenner Moyer
IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR insight into
the true you, there’s a buffet of
personality questionnaires available.
Some are silly—like the Internet quiz
that tells everyone who takes it that
skeptical,” says Simine Vazire, a
personality researcher at the
University of California, Davis. “Until
we test them scientifically we can’t
tell the difference between that and
pseudoscience like astrology.”

8
 NEWS
One famous example of a popular
but dubious commercial personality
test is the Myers–Briggs Type
Indicator. This questionnaire divides
people into 16 different “types,” and
often the assessment will suggest
certain career or romantic pairings. It
costs $15 to $40 for an individual,
but psychologists say the question-
naire is one of the worst personality
tests in existence for a wide range
of reasons. It is unreliable because a
person’s type may change from day
to day. It gives false information
(“bogus stuff,” one researcher puts
it). The questions are confusing and
poorly worded. Vazire sums it up as
“shockingly bad.”
Personality questionnaires began
evolving about a century ago, says
Jim Butcher, an emeritus psycholo-
gist at the University of Minnesota.
“They started asking questions
about an individual’s thinking and
behavior during World War I,” he
says. “These were to study personal-
ity problems and mental health prob-
lems.” And importantly, he adds, the
U.S. military wanted the question-
naires to help weed out soldiers who
weren’t fit to fly military aircraft.
According to Butcher, during the
first half of the 20th century many
academics started creating different
personality scales. “Not just on
mental health diagnoses, but what
personality is like,” he says. The
problem with practically all of the
assessments at the time was they
were a built on the creators’ subjec-
tive feelings about personality, he
notes. “Then people started to raise
questions about do they really
measure what they think they’re
measuring? How reliable are those
conclusions, and are they valid?”
Butcher describes what followed
as a mass culling of personality
systems and questionnaires by the
scientific method. There is one
personality model that did survive
the 20th century, though. It is
popular among academics today
and is what Vazire uses in her
research. It’s called the Big 5
Personality Traits (aka 5-Factor
Model), and it was developed over
three decades beginning in 1961 at
Brooks Air Force Base. From then to
the 1990s, several psychologists,
including Lewis Goldberg, Warren
Norman, Paul Costa and Robert
McCrae, helped develop the model
into its modern form.
Vazire says in developing the Big
5 Personality model, psychologists
tried to avoid pitfalls that plagued
early personality researchers—like
selecting criteria based primarily on
intuition. Instead, the Big 5 model
took a holistic tack by compiling
every word that could be considered
a personality trait and creating
simple, straightforward questions
about them. For example, on a scale
of 1 to 5, are you outgoing, socia-
ble? Have a forgiving nature? Based
on how people answered initial
surveys, researchers used statistical
methods to group traits that seemed
to cluster together (like “talkative”
and “sociable”) into five basic
categories: extraversion, conscien-
tiousness, agreeableness, neuroti-
cism and openness to experience.
The other model, the HEXACO
model of personality structure
created in 2000 by psychologists
Kibeom Lee at the University of
Calgary and Michael Ashton at
Brock University in Ontario, is similar
but adds an extra category: hones-
ty-humility.
The key to the Big 5 model is its
simplicity. It doesn’t sort anybody
into a “type”; it just informs them
where they fall on a continuum of
personality traits. There are no tricks
and no surprises to be revealed,
Vazire says. “In a way, it’s disappoint-
ing. It just means that personality
tests can only tell you what you tell
it.” You won’t learn anything that you
didn’t already know about yourself,
she adds, and its accuracy comes
entirely from how honest and
self-reflective you were with your
answers.
At best, Vazire says you could use
it as a comparative tool that can tell
you how you rank on extroversion
compared with others who have
taken the same test. There have
been studies that show certain Big
5 factor scores correlate with
certain outcomes—conscientious-
ness correlates with longer life, for
instance, and extroversion correlates
with higher sales for sales reps. “But
that doesn’t mean someone with
high extroversion will be a better
salesperson,” Vazire says. Correla-
tions are just that; they could be
incidental. But commercial personal-
ity assessments seem to depend
heavily on such correlations. For
example, one assessment from The
Predictive Index, a company that
measures behavioral characteristics
and matches personality profiles to
jobs, views such correlations in their
own studies as a measure of
9

NEWS
success. “[We showed] in one
client, a retail jeweler, that
increases in dominance or
aggression was responsible for
$125,000 in revenue,” says
Thad Peterson, one of the
company’s executives. The idea
behind The Index, Peterson
says, is to use those measures
to help “marry people to [job]
positions.”
Such personality assess-
ments—particularly those
targeted toward hiring recruiters
and managers—aim to uncover
a kind of “hidden truth about the
person,” says Randy Stein, a
psychologist at California
Polytechnic State University,
Pomona. “They assume that
there is an essence of you and
an essence of the job, and you
should be matching up those two
things in hiring,” he says. “But I
don’t think there is a hidden
truth—and even if there is, a
personality test doesn’t do it.”
Like the Big 5 model, any
personality or behavior
assessment can’t know things
you haven’t explicitly answered
in the questionnaire, Stein says.
Sometimes commercial
personality tests ask odd
questions—like Do you identify
with snakes? or How do you
react to a certain color?—and try
to draw inferences from your
answers. Those kinds of
conclusions venture into the
pseudoscientific, Stein says.
There are other reasons why
Stein thinks some personality
assessments may be pseudo-
scientific. “What those tests will
tell people is true or false is
determined by what people are
willing to pay for,” he says. “Their
process as a company is to tell
people whatever will sell the
product.” By contrast, the Big 5
and HEXACO models were
shaped by an empirical process
and independent peer review
that showed people’s scores
tended to be consistent, and
predictions made using the
models are reproducible.
Without that, Stein says person-
ality tests should be treated with
extreme suspicion.
Some companies like The
Predictive Index say their
product meets such standards.
The company invested in an
audit, paying over $20,000 to
Follow us on Twitter
Norwegian classification firm
DNV GL to review their product
and certify that it complies with
a standard set by the European
Federation of Psychologists’
Associations. Two Index repre- @sciam
sentatives, Greg Barnett and twitter.com/sciam
Austin Fossey, also say predic-
tions based on their methods
are accurate.
Perhaps. U.C. Davis’s Vazire
says it is fairly easy to reach
some level of validity. “If I just
asked you to make a question-
naire on extroversion, you would
probably do a pretty good job,”
she says. It is because we are
all judges of character, and we
often do well at intuiting whom
to date or hire and who we are,
Vazire says. If the process
seems confusing or if questions
veer off into the abstract, that’s
a red flag. Personality, she says,
is just not that mysterious.
—Angus Chen
10
 NEWS
Neuroscience
Discovers Power
of “Lesion Network
Mapping”
A new technique is reviving the
century-old study of brain lesions
and revealing surprising things
about neurological disorders like
Parkinson’s disease
ONE OF NEUROSCIENCE’S foundational
experiments wasn’t performed in a
Nobel laureate’s lab but occurred in
a railyard in 1848 when an acciden-
tal explosion sent a tamping iron
through 25-year-old Phineas Gage’s
forehead. Gage survived, but those
studying his history detailed distinct
personality changes resulting from
the accident. He went from
even-tempered to impulsive and
profane. The case is likely the
earliest—and most famous—of using
a “lesion” to link a damaged brain
region to its function. In the ensuing
decades, to study the brain was to
study lesions. Lesion cases fed most
of the era’s knowledge of the brain.
One might think that modern
neuroscience, with its immense
toolkit of experimental techniques,
no longer needs lesions like Gage’s
to parse the brain’s inner workings.
Lesion studies, though, seem to be
having a revival. A new method
called lesion network mapping is
clearing the cobwebs off the lesion
study and uniting it with modern
brain connectivity data. The results
are revealing surprising associa-
tions between brain regions and
disorders.
Thankfully, most lesions aren’t a
tamping iron through the forehead.
occurs, then region X must control
function Y.
This logic, though, is a bit mislead-
ing. No single brain region can really
control any function. The modern
view of the brain is that individual
functions rely on a network of
interconnected brain regions
working in concert. Thus, modern
neuroscience views individual lesion
cases as imperfect, uncontrolled
experiments of nature that don’t
necessarily speak to how a network
controls a brain function. This point
becomes obvious when researchers
pool, or meta-analyze, lesion data.
When looking at all of the published
lesion cases for a given condition—
say parkinsonism—researchers see
Strokes, hemorrhages, or tumors that the lesions that cause this
make up most lesion cases. Nine- condition don’t occur in just one
teenth-century neurologists like Paul region. Lesions seemingly all over
Broca made foundational discover- the brain cause parkinsonism and
ies by studying patients with pecu- other conditions. This fact, along
liar symptoms resulting from these with the emergence of elegant
common neurological insults. Broca experimental tools have pushed
and his contemporaries synthesized lesion studies to the sidelines of
a theory of the brain from lesions: neuroscience. Some researchers,
that the brain is segmented. Differ- though, are attempting to revive the
GERD ALTMANN PIXABAY
ent regions control different func- relevance of lesion studies—both for
tions. Lesion studies lend a lawyerly neurology and psychiatry. The
logic to the brain: if region X is authors of a new study published in
destroyed and function Y no longer Brain use the disparate locations of
11
 NEWS
lesions to their advantage—in this
case to better understand the
neuroanatomy of parkinsonism.
Parkinsonism is a grouping of
symptoms affecting movement. It
consists of slowed movement, rigid
musculature, and tremor. The most
common cause of these symptoms
is Parkinson’s disease, where
dopamine-producing cells in the
substantia nigra are progressively
lost. Nigral cell loss in Parkinson’s
disease occurs through a slow
degenerative process that is still
poorly understood. But parkinsonism
is possible without nigral degenera-
tion, and notably can occur following
a sudden lesion like a stroke or
hemorrhage. Patients with lesion-in-
duced parkinsonism aren’t diag-
nosed with Parkinson’s disease,
exactly, but their slowed movement,
rigid musculature and tremor are
nearly identical to those with
“classical” Parkinson’s disease. The
study compiled 29 published cases
of lesion-induced parkinsonism. The
lesions did not all occur in the same
region, and surprisingly most were
not in the substantia nigra.
The authors hypothesized that the
parkinsonism-causing lesions,
despite occurring in disparate brain
structures, disrupt common connec-
tivity networks in the brain. To test
this, the authors overlaid these
lesion locations on a map of the
brain known as the connectome—a
structural map of region to region
connectivity derived from functional
MRI data. With the lesions applied to
the connectome, the authors were
able to identify networks—or tracks
of connectivity—that the lesions
disrupted.
Each of the 29 lesions sat within
several different networks, which is to
be expected as the brain is a rich
tangle of connectivity. But the authors
saw that 28 out of 29 cases affected
networks that connected through a
small, sheet-like structure called the
claustrum. The claustrum is rarely
discussed in the field of movement
control or Parkinson’s disease and is
generally understudied.
An important aspect of the study
is that none of the 29 lesions were
to the claustrum, itself. It took the
combination of the lesions and the
connectome to identify the claus-
trum as a structure of importance
for parkinsonism.
The claustrum coincidentally
appears as a rest stop, so to speak,
on the network maps of almost all
the lesion cases. But is this just a
coincidence or is it important? To
address the claustrum’s importance
to parkinsonism, the authors turned
to patients with the more common,
degenerative form of Parkinson’s
disease who had deep brain stimula-
tors implanted in their brain. Deep
brain stimulation is a treatment of
last resort for Parkinson’s disease
and doesn’t yield universal improve-
ment. In most cases, stimulating
electrodes are implanted into a
region called the subthalamic
nucleus. The precise location within
the subthalamic nucleus varies from
patient to patient. The authors
examined the precise location of
deep brain stimulators within
Parkinson’s disease brains and
overlaid those locations onto the
connectome. They saw that when
electrode locations were within
networks that flowed through the
claustrum—presumably altering
claustrum activity—patients saw
better results from deep brain
stimulation. This result argues that
claustrum activity plays a critical role
in generating parkinsonian move-
ment. Also, altering that activity
provides relief from parkinsonism.
Nineteenth-century lesion studies
were framed by the question: Which
region controls which function?
Decades of neuroscience have
reframed a more nuanced question:
Which regions are important to
which functions? Lesion network
mapping empowers lesion studies to
rigorously answer this newer
question. To patient communities,
however, the question has always
been: Can this finding help us? In
the case of the claustrum and
Parkinson’s disease, only time will
tell. Targeting treatments—like deep
brain stimulation—to the claustrum,
though, may be a helpful advance
for those with Parkinson’s disease.
—Sam Rose
12
 THE
PERSONALITY
TRAIT THAT
IS RIPPING
AMERICA
(and the World)
APART
People who are antagonistic resonate
more with populist messages
By Scott Barry Kaufman

GETTY IMAGES
13
 Scott Barry Kaufman is a psychologist, author and podcaster
who is deeply interested in using psychological science to help
all kinds of minds live a creative, fulfilling and meaningful life.
Kaufman has over 60 scientific publications on intelligence,
creativity, personality and well-being. In addition to writing the
column Beautiful Minds for Scientific American, he also hosts
The Psychology Podcast. He is also the author and editor of eight
books. Kaufman received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from
Yale University and an M. Phil. in experimental psychology from
the University of Cambridge. You can find out more at http://
ScottBarryKaufman.com.

“First there was the “Me Generation” then “Generation Me.” Now we have empirical evidence that we ness—politeness and compassion are strongly correlated
live in what will become known as the “Asshole Age” otherwise known as the Twitter Era...” in the general population, and both aspects together com-
— Personality Psychologist Brent Roberts on Twitter prise the overall personality domain of agreeableness.
Like all other personality variation, differences on the
“Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government agreeableness-antagonism dimension are reflected in the
controlled by you, the American people. ... The political establishment, that is trying to stop us, is the same brain. Neurologically, those who score high on agreeable-
group responsible for our disastrous trade deals, massive illegal immigration, and economic and for- ness tend to show greater activation of the default mode
eign policies that have bled our country dry... The only thing that can stop this corrupt machine is you.” brain network, which is associated with the ability to
— Donald Trump’s Argument For America simulate the mental states of others and the higher-level
integration of different types of information necessary
THERE ARE MANY DIVIDES IN THE WORLD RIGHT prehensible the other person’s behavior may seem, espe- for both understanding and sharing the emotional expe-
now. But there’s one divide, deeply embedded into the cially when it comes to adhering to social norms and altru- riences of others. Agreeableness is also associated with
core of human nature, that helps explain many other istic behavior. the capacity for emotion regulation, particularly the sup-
divides. What I’m referring to is a source of human per- Agreeableness (the opposite pole of antagonism) con- pression of aggressive impulses and other socially dis-
sonality variation that is built right into our DNA: antag- sists of two main aspects: politeness and compassion. ruptive emotions. From a neurochemistry perspective,
onism. By really zooming in on this trait, and under- Politeness reflects the tendency to conform to social agreeableness involves the neurotransmitters testoster-
standing how antagonism interacts with environmental norms and refrain from belligerence and the exploitation one (related to the inclination away from politeness and
conditioning and messaging, we can gain a greater of others, whereas compassion reflects the tendency to toward antagonism) and oxytocin (related to the tenden-
understanding of one of the most prominent divides in care about others emotionally. People who score high in cy for compassion and in-group social bonding).
the world today: populism. politeness are preoccupied with fairness, whereas those The antagonism-agreeableness dimension has a lot of
First, let’s dive in to the latest science of antagonism. who score high in compassion are more preoccupied predictive value in the real world (not just in the scientif-
with helping others, especially those in need. ic laboratory). Antagonistic people are more likely to
THE SCIENCE OF ANTAGONISM On the other end of the pole, people with low levels of respond aggressively and retaliate when treated unfairly
The antagonism-agreeableness dimension of personality politeness (antagonistic people) tend to score high on by others (although they tend to care much less about
is one of the five main dimensions of personality. Like the measures of aggression, whereas those with low levels of whether others are treated unfairly). At work, antagonis-
other major dimensions of personality, this trait is nor- compassion tend to score poorly on measures of empathy. tic people perform better than highly agreeable people
mally distributed in the population. The more two people While politeness and compassion can come apart—e.g., a after receiving an angry speech from their manager (it
differ on this fundamental dimension, the more incom- person can score high in compassion but low in polite- fires them up), whereas highly agreeable people tend to

14
improve their performance after their managers express
happiness for their performance.
There are also deep implications of this personality
dimension for politics. Politicians who are more antago-
nistic get more media attention and are more often elect-
ed than more agreeable politicians. In the general popu-
lation, antagonistic people are more likely to distrust pol-
itics in general, to believe in conspiracy theories, and to
support secessionist movements.
Antagonism isn’t absolutely good or bad. Daniel Nettle
speculated that all personality traits evolved to have
trade-offs, and that’s why variation exists in personality.
From an evolutionary perspective, agreeableness has
both benefits (attention to mental states of others; har-
monious interpersonal relationships, valued coalitional
partnerships) as well as costs (subject to social cheating
and exploitation; failure to maximize selfish advantage).
Nevertheless, because of the existence of such wide vari-
ation in this trait, highly antagonistic leaders can arouse
and influence wide swaths of people who score high in
this trait through their rhetoric and messaging.
ANTAGONISM AND RESONANCE
WITH POPULISM
There has been an increasing recognition in psychology
that personality traits interact with messaging from lead-
ers. “A crucial skill for politicians is... to speak the ‘lan-
guage of personality’... by identifying and conveying those
individual characteristics that are most appealing at a cer-
tain time to a particular constituency,” note Gian Caprara
and Philip Zimbardo. They found that voters select politi-
cians whose traits match their own personality.
Along similar lines, Patti Valkenburg and Jochen Peter
introduced their Differential Susceptibility to Media
Effects Model (DSMM), which argues that the rhetoric
and framing of a message has more cognitive and emo-
tional impact on people who share particular dispositions
than with other people. For example, the message of hope
might be more attractive to those who are more prone to
experience positive affect and enthusiasm, while the mes-
sage of change might be more attractive among those will-
ing to take risks.
Perhaps the most important interaction in the world
today, however, is that between antagonism and populism.
The core feature of populism is an anti-establishment
message and a focus on the central importance of the peo-
ple. The anti-establishment message portrays the political
elite as corrupt and evil, and disinterested in the interests
of “the pure people.” According to John Judis and Ruy
Teixeira, the essential divide among populists is “the peo-
ple versus the powerful.”
In a recent series of studies, political communication
professor Bert Bakker and his colleagues conducted the
largest and most systematic investigation into the ques-
tion: What happens when antagonistic citizens receive an
anti-establishment message? They found strong support
for the notion that the anti-establishment message of pop-
ulists resonates the most with highly antagonistic people.
This finding was confirmed in seven countries across three
different continents. Antagonism predicted support for
populists for both right-wing (Trump, UKIP, Danish Peo-
ple’s Party, Party for Freedom, SVP) and left-wing (Podem-
os, Chavez) populists.
Using physiological measures, they were also able to
establish the deeper emotional processes that underlie
this link. Employing a measure of skin conductance
(which captures activity of the sympathetic nervous sys-
tem), the researchers found an increase in arousal in
response to political messages that were congruent with
a person’s personality. In particular, antagonistic people
found an anti-establishment message arousing, where-
as highly agreeable people found a pro-establishment
message arousing.
This is important because emotions play an important
role in determining how political communication affects
us. Those who are more aroused by a particular message
will be more likely to remember it, and to seek the mes-
sage again in the long term. These findings suggest that
politicians can exert substantial influence over voters by
providing a message that resonates emotionally with the
personality of the voter.
They also looked at authoritarianism. Authoritarian-
ism encapsulates a preference for social order, structure
and obedience. Prior research has shown that high
authoritarians express less tolerance towards out-group
members and support populist parties with a right-wing
host ideology. Consistent with this, Bakker and col-
leagues found that while authoritarianism did not pre-
dict an anti-establishment message, it did predict sup-
port for Trump and UKIP, as well as any candidate with
a strong anti-immigration stance. These findings suggest
a second route to populism, through the particular ideol-
ogy associated with right-wing populism.
IMPLICATIONS OF THE ANTAGONISM-
AGREEABLENESS DIVIDE
There seems to be something different in the air these
days. Depending on your perspective (and personality),
things are either more “sinister” or they are more “revo-
lutionary.” But I think we can all agree that the political
landscape and discourse has changed dramatically in
only the past few years. There were always party divides,
but there seems to be prominence of a different kind of
divide, that between the people and politicians. As Dutch
political scientist Cas Mudde notes, “today populist dis-
course has become mainstream in the politics of West-
ern democracies.”
It’s important to emphasize that populism is an ideol-
ogy that transcends liberalism and conservatism. Research
shows that both liberals and conservatives are agreeable,
but they are agreeable in different ways: the politeness
15
aspect of agreeableness is associated with a conservative
outlook and more traditional moral values, whereas the
compassion aspect of agreeableness is associated with lib-
eralism and egalitarianism. Conservatism and liberalism
can complement each other; society needs those in power
who care deeply about the fairness of everyone and the
stability of society as well as those who are more exclusive-
ly concerned with the suffering of those in need.
It’s also important to recognize that populism alone
isn’t necessarily dangerous. A healthy democracy will
include those who challenge the government and are crit-
ical of those in power. What is particularly problematic is
when a highly antagonistic leader uses rhetoric that arous-
es the emotions of other antagonistic people and rallies
them to support a particular host ideology that is perni-
cious. This can lead to a situation in which a high propor-
tion of people in power are those who lack empathy, per-
spective-taking, and the self-control necessary to put the
brakes on aggressive and disruptive impulses.
Of course, not all people who support populism are
antagonistic people. There are a number of reasons why
people support populists. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hoch-
schild has done a tremendous job trying to understand
what many Trump voters were thinking when they cast
their ballots. The reasons include “lives ripped apart by
stagnant wages, a loss of home, an elusive American
dream, and political choices and views that make sense in
the context of their lives.”
Nevertheless, there is a growing prominence of antago-
nistic people on social media, YouTube, and alternative
media outlets who believe they have better answers than
the government “elite” and are empowered and aroused
by Trump’s populism messaging to have more influence
than ever before. Rather than socioeconomic factors being
the most prominent explanation for the appeal of popu-
lism (Bakker and colleagues actually controlled for socio-
economic status in their studies), a critical reason why
people have become more receptive to populism is that
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people have become better educated and more free to speak
their views in public. In fact, the appeal of populism is
due, in part, to the increased egalitarianism of the 1960s,
a consequence being that citizens today expect more from
politicians, and feel more competent to judge their actions.
@scientific_american
instagram.com/scientific_american
On the whole, this is a good thing. However, as Cas
Mudde points out, more and more citizens think they
have a good understanding of what politicians do and
think they can do it better, while at the same time, less
people actually want to do it better by actively participat-
ing in various aspects of political life. Political theorist
Robert Dahl put it well when he wrote, “Nearly a half-cen-
tury of surveys provides overwhelming evidence that cit-
izens do not put much value on actually participating
themselves in political life.”
Interestingly enough, populist supporters don’t actu-
ally want to be led by the “common person”; rather, they
want their own values and wishes to be enacted by a
“great” leader. Mudde has found that most populist lead-
ers are actually “outsider-elites”; they are highly connect-
ed to the elites, but they are not part of the elites. Sup-
porters of populism simply don’t want to be governed by
an “alien” elite, whose policies do not directly satisfy
their own wishes and concerns.
This research is important to keep in mind, as it looks
like the use of populist rhetoric in the service of enacting
more radical policies is not going away anytime soon. As
Mudde observes, due to a number of factors, “populism
will be a more regular feature of future democratic poli-
tics, erupting whenever significant sections of ‘the silent
majority’ feels that ‘the elite’ no longer represents them.”
Understanding differences in personality may not be
the only factor involved in understanding the appeal of
populism, but for the sake of the country and the world,
it’s an important one to consider. M
16
Happy, with a
20 Percent Chance
of SadnessResearchers are developing
wristbands and apps to

SALLY ANSCOMBE GETTY IMAGES

predict moods—but the
technology has pitfalls as
well as promise
By Matt Kaplan

17
I n the winter of 1994, a young man in his early twenties named Tim was
a patient in a London psychiatric hospital. Despite a happy and
energetic demeanor, Tim had bipolar disorder and had recently
attempted suicide. During his stay, he became close with a visiting U.S.
undergraduate psychology student called Matt. The two quickly bonded
over their love of early-nineties hip-hop, and just before being
discharged, Tim surprised his friend with a portrait that he had painted
of him. Matt was deeply touched. But after returning to the United States with portrait
in hand, he learned that Tim had ended his life by jumping off a bridge.

Matthew Nock now studies the psychology of self-harm

at Harvard University. Even though more than two
decades have passed since his time with Tim, the portrait
still hangs in his office as a constant reminder of the need
to develop a way to predict when people are likely to try
and kill themselves. There are plenty of known risk fac-
tors for suicide—heavy alcohol use, depression and being
male among them—but none serve as tell-tale signs of
imminent suicidal thoughts. Nock thinks that he is get-
ting close to solving that.
Since January 2016, he has been using wristbands and
a phone application to study the behavior of consenting
patients who are at risk of suicide, at Massachusetts Gen-
eral Hospital in Boston. And he has been running a simi-
lar trial at the nearby Franciscan Children’s Hospital this
year. So far, he says, although his results have not yet been
published, the technology seems able to predict a day in
advance, and with reasonable accuracy, when partici-
pants will report thinking of killing themselves.
Nock’s trial is one effort to make use of the burgeoning
science of mood forecasting: the idea that by continuous-
ly recording data from wearable sensors and mobile
phones, it will be possible not only to track and perhaps
identify signs of mental illness in a person, but even to
predict when their well-being is about to dip. Nock collab-
orates with Rosalind Picard, an electrical engineer and
computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology. Picard leads a team that has tracked hundreds of
undergraduates in universities in New England with
phones and wristbands, and reports being able to predict
episodes of sadness in these students a day before symp-
toms arrive.
Hints that it might be possible to track impending
emotional vulnerability have sparked strong commercial
interest. Mindstrong Health, a company in Palo Alto,
Calif., which has raised U.S. $29 million in venture capi-
tal, tracks how people tap, type and scroll on their
phones, to spot shifts in neurocognitive function. Paul
Dagum, a physician and computer scientist who found-
ed the firm, says that data from a person’s touchscreen
interactions can identify oncoming episodes of depres-
sion, although that work has not yet been published. Oth-
er companies are also researching the use of such “digi-
tal phenotyping” to recognize symptoms of mental illness.
Among them is Verily, a life-sciences firm owned by Goo-
gle’s parent company, Alphabet.
At this stage, the reliability of mood-prediction technol-
ogy is unclear. Few results have been published, and
groups that have released results say they have achieved
only moderate rather than outstanding accuracy when it
comes to forecasting moods. Picard, however, is confident
that the concept will hold up. “I suffered from depression
early in my career, and I do not want to go back there,” she
says. “I am certain that by tracking my behaviors with my
phone I can make it far less likely I will return to that ter-
rible place.”
But researchers including Picard have reservations
about possible downsides of their creations. They worry
that scientists and clinicians haven’t thought enough
about how to inform users of an imminent emotional
downturn. There are also questions about whether such
warnings could cause harm. And some wonder whether
corporations or insurance companies might use the tech-
nology to track the future mental health of their employ-
ees or customers. “The [potential for] misuse of this tech-
nology is what keeps me up at night,” Dagum says.
PREDICTING DEPRESSION
Picard got into mood-prediction research indirectly. A
decade ago, she showed that it was possible to use wrist-
bands to detect seizures, sometimes minutes before
spasms shook the body, by tracking the electrical conduc-
tance on a person’s skin. In 2013, she co-founded Empat-
ica, a company in Cambridge that sells sensors, including

18
a smartwatch approved by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration to monitor signs of seizures and issue
alerts to caregivers.
Working with her PhD student at the time, Akane
Sano, now at Rice University, Picard saw potential for
wider applications. They hypothesized that it might be
possible to combine data from wrist sensors and mobile
phones to monitor stress, sleep, activity and social inter-
actions to predict general mental health and
well-being.
Sano and Picard collaborated with a team at Harvard
Medical School to design a study that would track uni-
versity students on a daily basis. Since 2013, the team has
studied 300 students—50 each semester, for 30 days at a
time—by giving them watch-like devices to wear. The
instruments measure the students’ movements, note the
amount of light they are exposed to, monitor their body
temperature and record the electrical conductance of
their skin. Sano and Picard also developed software,
installed on participants’ phones, which records data
about their calls, text messages, location, Internet use,
“screen on” timing and social interactions. The team also
recorded much of their e-mail activity. Students filled out
surveys twice a day about their academic, extracurricu-
lar and exercise activities. They described their sleep
quality, their mood, health, stress levels, social interac-
tions and how many caffeinated and alcoholic drinks
they were consuming. The students also reported their
exam scores and filled out extensive surveys at the begin-
ning and end of the 30-day studies.
By 2017, the team had reported training an algorithm
to learn from these surveys and to weight the importance
of hundreds of measurements. The system can accurate-
ly forecast, a day in advance, the students’ happiness,
calmness and health, Picard’s team says. In the experi-
ment, individuals had to be monitored for seven days to
reach forecast-accuracy levels of around 80 percent.
Picard’s analysis suggests that wristbands and mobile
phones are not able to predict slight changes in mood.
But when changes in well-being are large, predictions are
more reliable. Some of the signals make intuitive sense—
moving around before bed might suggest agitation, for
instance—but the details are not always understood. As
an example, social interactions might modify stress lev-
els, which can be reflected in skin electrical conductance,
but it’s unclear whether many peaks of skin conductance
in a day is good or bad, because it increases both when
people are problem solving and when they are stressed.
Simply interpreting someone’s mood using such signals
is a great achievement, says computer scientist Lou-
is-Philippe Morency at Carnegie Mellon University, who
thinks artificial-intelligence technology could help with
mental-health assessments. But he is cautious about its
ability to forecast moods. “Since tomorrow’s mood is often
similar to today’s mood, we need more research to be able
to clearly decouple these two phenomena. It is possible
that current forecasting technologies are mostly predict-
ing spillover emotion from one day to the next,” he says.
Picard thinks improvements will come: “We are the
pioneers saying that this is truly possible and are show-
ing data to back this claim up. Reliability will grow and
grow with more data.” She has made her algorithms
open-source, so that others with access to the technolo-
gy can try to reproduce her work.
“Picard is on to something, and her track record of
transparency with her algorithms, models and data sets
makes me even more confident of that. People don’t make
it so easy to recreate their work when they are unsure
about their results,” says Jonathan Gratch, a psychologist
at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the Universi-
ty of Southern California.
Nock’s trial on suicidal thoughts grew out of a collabo-
ration with Picard. So far, he has monitored 192 people,
mainly using wristbands and by asking them how they
are feeling, through a phone app or interview. For now,
he has trained devices not on an individual’s data, but on
those of the entire group of participants, and he says that
he has identified a few measurable signs that can predict
later suicidal thoughts with an accuracy of 75 percent.
Some of the most important factors, he says, are consid-
erable movement in the evening, perhaps denoting rest-
lessness or agitation at night, mixed with spikes in skin
electrical conductance and an elevated heart rate. But he
declined to give more details because his paper is under
review at a journal.
MOVING TO MARKET
Commercial firms are less willing than are academics to
discuss their results. But in March, Mindstrong reported
finding digital biomarkers—patterns of swipes and taps
on a phone—that correlate with scores on neuropsy-
chological performance tests. On its Web site, the firm
says it has completed five clinical trials, the results of
which have not been disclosed, and in February, it
announced a partnership with Tokyo-based Takeda
Pharmaceuticals to explore the development of digital
biomarkers for conditions such as schizophrenia and
treatment-resistant depression. It has competition:
Verily says its digital phenotyping projects include one
designed to detect post-traumatic stress disorder using
smartphones and watches.
Mindstrong says it’s moving beyond measuring brain
function with smartphones, to predicting it. “When we
take in the trajectory of numerous biomarkers over the
course of six or seven days, we can predict episodes of
depression up to a week in the future,” says Dagum—
although he declined to say which signals his firm is
using, because the company was submitting papers on its
work to journals.
The plan for Mindstrong’s phone-based app (the compa-
ny is not using wristbands) is to embed its touchscreen-in-
19
teraction measures into a digital mental-health-care sys-
tem. It has been sharing results with the state of California,
which sees enough clinical potential to have granted the
firm $10 million over three years from a state-managed,
$60-million mental-health innovation fund. “Will all of
these data that we are collecting ultimately have clinical
utility? We don’t know yet,” says psychiatrist Tom Insel,
who co-founded Mindstrong and had previously started
the mental-health unit at Verily after a 13-year stint as head
of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.
Picard questions Insel’s approach at Mindstrong. “I
believe he has made a company with an idea that is not
proven to work as well as other ideas,” she says. Neither
she nor Nock yet have commercial plans for their
mood-prediction technology. (Besides Empatica, however,
Picard has co-founded Affectiva, a firm in Boston that sells
technology to analyze facial and vocal expressions.)
Insel says the technology needs testing in real-world set-
tings, with patients and health providers. “We are not run-
ning before walking. California is paying us to learn how
to walk,” he says. He adds that he doesn’t view Picard as a
rival. “This is a hard problem that no one has solved. My
best guess is that it will take all of us using many approach-
es to prove the clinical value of this technology—and,
frankly, I’d love to have at least 10 other groups of Roz’s
lab’s caliber working on digital phenotyping,” he says.
CHANGING BEHAVIOR
Picard is confident that mood forecasting—even if it
requires individualized training from a consenting
user—will become a perfected art. The real question, she
says, is whether it can be used to help change a forecast-
ed dark mood.
Nock and psychologist Evan Kleiman, also at Harvard
University, are working with 150 patients to encourage
them to reappraise things that they are viewing negative-
ly by using cognitive reframing exercises. These exercis-
es are activated on the patients’ phones when their wrist
monitors detect signals that predict upcoming suicidal
thoughts. Beyond this, Nock is unclear what to do with
the data. “If we have someone who is predicted to be at
high risk for suicidal thoughts, or who notes that they are
100 percent likely to kill themselves, what do we do? Do
we send an ambulance? Contact their doctor? Do noth-
ing?” he wonders. “The ethics of this are extremely chal-
lenging.” Nock says he knows that those in his trial want
the technology. “Patients say all the time how useful they
would find an alert or guidance system,” he says.
Morency thinks that it is too soon for computers to be
giving mental-health advice on their own. His research
involves teaching computers to study facial expressions
and language so that they can work out what is on a per-
son’s mind, and he is now collaborating with psychiatrists
to install this technology in hospital mental-health wards.
The goal is for machines to study people during their
interactions with doctors, to discern whether psychiatric
disorders are present. The physicians still do the diagno-
sis; the computer analysis provides a separate assessment
that doctors can compare with their own. “The risks pre-
sented by a computer giving mental-health advice are sig-
nificant. We need more research to understand the long-
term impact of such technology,” Morency says.
Another issue, says Picard, is that actions to improve
mood are different for different people. In one of her
experiments, Picard found that one cluster of students
who had conversations with friends before going to sleep
enjoyed brighter moods the following day, whereas
another cluster experienced the inverse effect.
Barbara Fredrickson, a psychologist at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is concerned that the
act of predicting a mood could affect how people feel. “It
seems likely that people will give negative mood fore-
casts a great deal of attention, and for some, this could
start an emotional negativity tailspin that could be truly
damaging,” she says.
Justin Baker, a researcher in mental illnesses who is
the scientific director of the McLean Institute for Tech-
nology in Psychiatry in Belmont, Mass., says: “I think it
will be just as difficult for us to determine what advice a
person needs as it will be to determine how to present
that advice to them in a manner that does not get ignored
or make them worse.”
Picard has grand visions for digital mood forecasting.
She thinks it could improve the health of the general
public, and in particular that it might benefit corpora-
tions. “Why do so many amazing companies that give
their employees every perk under the sun still lose so
many staff to depression? Can we catch the coming tran-
sition before it takes place?” she says. But she also wor-
ries that the technology might be misused. Picard thinks
that new regulations might be needed to prevent, say,
corporations from targeting advertising at those whose
bad or good moods can be seen coming, or to keep insur-
ance companies from setting prices based on signs of
their customers’ mental health.
“A few bad actors who misuse this technology could
spoil the benefits for patients with serious mental-health
issues,” says Insel. Mindstrong, he says, is working with
a bioethics group at Stanford University and plans to
publish a paper on these matters shortly.
Picard argues the research efforts are worthwhile.
“Clinical depression is often emotional death by a
thousand cuts,” she says. “If we can help to identify the
many little things that weigh us down over time and
drive us into a perpetual sorrowful state, we can make a
big difference.” M
This article is reproduced with permission and was
first published in Nature on October 30, 2018.
20
Dissecting the Bloodthirsty
Bliss of Death Metal

STEVE BROWN GETTY IMAGES

Fans of this violent music report feelings of transcendence and
positive emotions; psychologists want to learn why
By David Noonan Cannibal Corpse

21

Brutality now becomes my appetite
Violence is now a way of life
The sledge my tool to torture
As it pounds down on your forehead
SHAKESPEARE IT’S NOT. THOSE LYRICS, FROM
“Hammer Smashed Face” by the band Cannibal Corpse,
are typical of death metal—a subgenre of heavy metal
music that features images of extreme violence and
the sonic equivalent of, well, a sledgehammer to the
forehead.
The appeal of this marginal musical form, which clear-
ly seems bent on assaulting the senses and violating even
the lowest standards of taste, is mystifying to nonfans—
which is one reason music psychologist William Forde
Thompson was drawn to it. Thompson and his colleagues
have published three papers about death metal and its
fans this year, and several more are in the works.
“It’s the paradox of enjoying a negative emotion that I
was interested in,” says Thompson, a professor at Mac-
quarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Why are people
interested in music that seems to induce a negative emo-
tion, when in everyday life we tend to avoid situations
that will induce a negative emotion?” A number of stud-
ies have explored the emotional appeal of sad music,
Thompson notes. But relatively little research has exam-
ined the emotional effects of listening to music that is
downright violent.
Thompson’s work has produced some intriguing
insights. The biggest surprise? “The ubiquitous stereo-
type of death metal fans—fans of music that contains vio-
lent themes and explicitly violent lyrics—[is] that they
are angry people with violent tendencies,” Thompson
says. “What we are finding is that they are not angry peo-
ple. They’re not enjoying anger when they listen to the
music, but they are in fact experiencing a range of posi-
tive emotions.”
Those positive emotions, as reported by death metal
fans in an online survey that Thompson and his team
conducted, include feelings of empowerment, joy, peace
and transcendence. So far, almost all of the anger and
tension Thompson has documented in his death metal
studies has been expressed by nonfans after listening to
samples of the music.
In a paper entitled “Who Enjoys Listening to Violent
Music and Why?,” published earlier this year in Psycholo-
gy of Popular Media Culture, Thompson and colleagues
sought to identify specific personality traits that distin-
guished death metal fans from nonfans. In the study,
which involved 48 self-described death metal fans and 97
nonfans (all in their 20s), he deployed an arsenal of estab-
lished psychological tools and measures. These included
the Big Five Inventory (BFI) of personality—which assess-
es openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeable-
ness and neuroticism—as well as the Interpersonal Reac-
David Noonan is a freelance writer specializing
in science and medicine.
tivity Index (IRI), a 28-item measure of empathy.
Notably, on measures of conscientiousness and agree-
ableness, the scores of death metal fans were subtly but
reliably lower than those of nonfans. One possible
explanation for this finding, the authors write, “is that
long-term, persistent exposure to violent media may
lead to subtle changes in one’s personality, desensitiz-
ing fans to violence and reinforcing negative social atti-
tudes.” But Thompson emphasizes that we just don’t
know. It is also possible that people with these person-
ality traits are more likely to gravitate to death metal.
Results from the IRI showed the fan group and non-
fan group with similar scores on the four dimensions of
empathy that the index measures. When listening to
death metal, however, study participants with lower
empathy scores were more likely to experience higher
levels of power and joy than those with greater empath-
ic concern. That was true as well, Thompson found, for
people whose personality assessment showed them to
be more open to experience and less neurotic.
In the study, each participant listened to four out of
eight 60-second samples of popular death metal songs
(selected by the researchers from multiple online lists)
and answered questions about the feelings the music
evoked. The songs included “Slowly We Rot,” by Obitu-
ary and “Waiting for the Screams,” by Autopsy, as well
as “Hammer Smashed Face.”
In one set of responses, the subjects rated (on a scale
of 1 to 7) the emotional effects of the music, using pre-
selected terms such as “fear” and “wonder.” In a second
22
step, they described in their own words how death met-
al made them feel. “With its repetitive, fast-paced tempo,
down-tuned instruments and blast beats, it is virtually
impossible not to be excited!” one fan wrote. “It sounds
like messed-up teenagers making throaty, irritating nois-
es about how bad their lives are,” wrote a nonfan. “It’s
annoying.”
The fact that the study relies on self-reporting by the
subjects is a red flag for Craig Anderson, a psychology pro-
fessor at Iowa State University, who has spent his career
researching the links between media violence and aggres-
sion and who was not involved in Thompson’s study.
Self-reporting “may or may not reflect reality,” Anderson
says. “People may be lying to you, or, more likely, people
don’t have direct access to many of the kinds of effects that
media have on them. They can construct an idea or
hypothesis, and self-reports are essentially that kind of
data. People may report that ‘Oh, yeah, this makes me feel
this way,’ without recognizing whether that’s really true.”
The paper acknowledges the limitations of self-report-
ing. But the researchers add that “the convergence of evi-
dence” from the personality assessments and other mea-
sures, along with the fans’ enthusiastic embrace of death
metal, suggests that the dramatic differences in emotion-
al and aesthetic responses between fans and nonfans are
genuine.
Chris Pervelis, a founding member and guitarist of the
band Internal Bleeding (whose songs include “Gutted
Human Sacrifice” and “The Pageantry of Savagery”), is
confident that the positive emotions he experiences
when he plays and listens to death metal are the real
thing. “When I’m locked into it, it’s like there’s electricity
flowing through me,” says the 50-year-old, who runs his
own graphic design business. “I feel really alive, like
hyper-alive. And the people I know in death metal are
smart, creative and generally good-hearted souls.”
In an essay published in August in Physics of Life
Reviews, Thompson and his co-author Kirk Olsen consid-
ered the possible role of brain chemistry in the response
to violence and aggression in music. The high amplitude,
fast tempo and other discordant traits of death metal,
they write, may elicit the release of neurochemicals such
as epinephrine—which “may underpin feelings of posi-
tive energy and power reported by fans, and tension, fear
and anger reported by nonfans.”
As for the central riddle of death metal—how explicitly
violent music might trigger positive emotions in some
people—Thompson cites a 2017 paper on the enjoyment
of negative emotions in art reception, published in Behav-
ioral and Brain Sciences. The paper, from the Max Planck
Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, suggests a mental pro-
cess that combines “psychological distancing” and “psy-
chological embracing.” In other words, a lack of real-
world consequences—it’s just a song!—may provide the
distance necessary for fans to appreciate the music as an
art form and embrace it.
A large body of research, by Anderson and others, has
established a clear link between aggression and multiple
types of media violence, including video games, film, tele-
vision and music with violent images and themes. “But
no one is saying that a normal, well-adjusted person—
who has almost no other risk factors for violent behav-
ior—is going to become a violent criminal offender sim-
ply because of their media habits,” says Anderson, whose
research includes a 2003 study of the effect of songs with
violent lyrics. “That never happens with just one risk fac-
tor, and we know of dozens of common risk factors.
Media violence happens to be one.”
One finding from Thompson’s research—that many
death metal fans say they listen to the music as a cathar-
sis, a way to release negative emotions and focus on
something that they enjoy—is also familiar to Pervelis. “I
call it the garbage can,” he says of the music he’s been
involved with for decades, “because it’s where I can dump
all my bad, emotional baggage. I put it into writing riffs
and letting it all out on stage, and it keeps me level and
completely sane.”
In his ongoing study of violent and aggressive music,
which includes a June paper in the journal Music Percep-
tion about the intelligibility of death metal lyrics (forget
about it, nonfans), Thompson has found that the limited
appeal of the form may be one of its key features for
fans—one at least as old as rock itself. He cites a 2006
paper by the late Karen Bettez Halnon, who found that
fans of heavy metal (as has certainly been the case with
many other genres and sub-genres over the decades)
view the music as an alternative to the “impersonal, con-
formist, superficial and numbing realities of
commercialism.”
In that vein, one possible function of the gruesome lyr-
ics that are the hallmark of death metal, says Thompson,
may be to “sharpen the boundary” between fans and
everybody else. Pervelis, who compares the violent imag-
ery to the “over-the-top, schlock horror films of the ’70s,”
says feeling like an outsider and an insider at the same
time is at the core of the death metal experience. “This
music is so extreme and so on the fringe of the main-
stream that people who listen to it and people who play
in death metal bands belong to an elite club. It’s like
we’ve got a little secret, and I think that’s what binds it
all. It’s a badge of honor.” M
23
 Post-
traumatic
Stress
Disorder
Can Be
Contagious
PTSD sometimes spreads from
trauma victims to the people who care
for them, including rescue workers,
spouses and even therapists
By Christian Wolf

GETTY IMAGES
24
 Christian Wolf is a science
journalist based in Berlin.

F
or years he was tortured by a horrifying image of 9/11: elevator doors Cieslak of the Trauma, Health, and Hazards Center at
at the World Trade Center slide open, and burning people stumble the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Medical
out; screams fill the area. Except he was not at the World Trade Center Campus found that almost one in five of more than 200
that day. A clinical psychologist, he had treated several patients who health care providers helping military personnel with
PTSD met the criteria for “secondary trauma,” one name
were there and suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a
that researchers apply to the phenomenon.
result, unable to rid themselves of the terrifying memories. Over the
A follow-up analysis concluded that the providers had
course of long, tortured conversations, these memories etched about as many symptoms, such as intrusions, as rescue
themselves indelibly into his own mind. They intruded on everyday situations and personnel or social workers who had been at the scene
turned up in nightmares. For the first time in his life he had panic attacks. at the time. And according to psychologist Tamara
Thomsen of the University of Hildesheim in Germany
And he is by no means alone. In the past several years who have themselves been terrorized, they live in a state and her colleagues, one in five of approximately 300
it has become evident that therapists, emergency per- of stress-induced hyperarousal, with an overly active trauma therapists who responded to an online ques-
sonnel, the police and family members who deal with fight-or-flight response. They may suffer from sleep dis- tionnaire could be diagnosed with moderate secondary
traumatized individuals can develop symptoms of PTSD orders and feel utterly hopeless. trauma—and one in 10 with severe secondary trauma.
secondhand. They endure what are called intrusions— The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statis- In several studies involving family members, Israeli
images, flashbacks and nightmares that cause them to tical Manual of Mental Disorders acknowledges the trauma researcher Zahava Solomon of Tel Aviv Univer-
experience the horrible events over and over—even problem. A diagnosis of PTSD no longer requires the sity found that a percentage of the wives of former pris-
though the memories are not their own. Like people immediate experience of a traumatic event; a person oners of war could be diagnosed with indirect trauma.
need not have been a victim or even an eyewitness. It is A 2017 review that included parents and children of war
enough simply to hear the details. Recent research has veterans, as well as committed partners, paints a more
IN BRIEF begun to clarify how common the problem is and why inconsistent picture, though: the partners were affect-
When caregivers, rescue workers or family members attend to someone some people are more susceptible to it than others. ed most frequently; parents seemed not to have been
with post-traumatic stress disorder who has suffered a horrible experi- “infected”; and children sometimes exhibited symp-
ence, a number of them develop “secondary” PTSD, without themselves
having witnessed the traumatic event. YOUR STRESS IS MY STRESS toms, although they were not especially severe.
The collected research suggests that 10 to 20 percent of How is it that PTSD can be transmitted to caregivers
Stories of trauma, it seems, can become etched into memory as if
they were the hearer’s own experiences. This memory transfer may people closely involved with those who have PTSD or family members? At first glance it would seem quite
occur because the brain regions that process real and imagined “catch” the condition themselves—with the numbers remarkable that the sensory experiences of one person
experiences overlap considerably.
varying depending on the study and the group being can end up in another person’s head. “In contrast to the
The more that caregivers or family members empathize with a victim
and the less able they are to maintain emotional distance, the more
investigated (such as therapists, social workers or fam- victims of primary trauma, there is no direct input from
likely it is that they will experience secondary trauma. ily members). In 2013, for instance, a team led by Roman the sensory organs that might be saved in memory in

25
the brain,” observes psychologist Judith Daniels of the
University of Groningen in the Netherlands. “There are
only images.” But she has a possible explanation: “The
regions of the brain that processes visual imagery have a
very strong overlap with regions that process imagined
visual experience.” In other words, at the processing level
it may make little difference to the brain whether the
images were created by the eyes and optic nerve or by the
powers of imagination. “If this is how the processing
works, then both may lead to visual intrusions,” she says.
WHO IS MOST SUSCEPTIBLE?
Another puzzle is why many therapists, caregivers and
family members do not succumb to secondhand PTSD,
whereas others do. Work by Thomsen’s group suggests
that a strong capacity for empathy—the ability to identi-
fy with the feelings of others—may increase the risk of
secondary trauma. In following up with their question-
naire respondents a year and a half later, Thomsen notes,
the researchers found that therapists “who exhibited
greater emotional empathy were more apt to experience
secondary trauma at the time of follow-up.”
For family members of trauma victims, a lack of emo-
tional distance may also contribute, as is suggested by the
finding that wives of former prisoners of war are more
vulnerable to indirect trauma if they identify with their
husband and internalize his traumatic experiences.
Researchers are also pondering the possible role of ear-
lier trauma in susceptibility to secondary PTSD, theoriz-
ing that the symptoms may represent the reawakening of
a prior, primary trauma. Some even doubt that symptoms
occur in the absence of earlier primary trauma. In this
reawakening scheme, trauma can add up over a lifetime,
with each additional episode increasing the risk of PTSD.
Hearing about the traumatic experiences of another per-
son may become the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
To Thomsen, this notion implies that it may be import-
ant to figure out whether symptoms in a given therapist
reflect secondary trauma or retraumatization. Daniels,
however, finds it implausible that personally experi-
enced trauma could by itself account for indirect PTSD.
As evidence, she points to a meta-analysis by Jennifer
Hensel, then at the University of Toronto, and her col-
leagues. The analysis found only a slight relation
between personally experienced trauma and develop-
ment of secondary trauma, which implies that past his-
tory probably explains only a small portion of the inten-
sity of someone’s symptoms. “So it’s not nothing, but it
is far from an adequate explanation for how these symp-
toms arise,” Daniels says.
In Daniels’s research with therapists, she stumbled on
another risk factor: the dissociative processing of sto-
ries. In other words, therapists may detach while a
patient relates disturbing events, experiencing the
world as unreal and dreamlike. Dissociation, Daniels
explains, could encourage indirect trauma because
memory traces form differently when someone is in this
state. When therapists dissociate while listening to a
patient, they store little information about when and
where the event took place and are less able to distin-
guish between themselves and the patient. As a result,
they may later remember the threat as an actual danger
experienced directly.
This last insight implies that we may have at least some
control over the extent to which hearing or reading about
traumatic experiences has a long-term effect on our psy-
che. Some preliminary findings indicate, for example,
that focusing on positive aspects, such as the healing pro-
cess, in conversations with a patient may help a therapist
or caregiver keep some needed emotional distance. Those
who cannot maintain a healthy distance may eventually
take a patient’s horrible memories home with them—and
become patients themselves. M
26
 The New Champions of Illusion
An excerpt from a new book on visual illusions • By Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik
What are visual illusions? Some people think illu-
sions are simply mistakes made by the brain:
erroneous computations, failures of perception
that we would do well to overcome. But what if
illusions are good things? Could it be that these
peculiar mismatches between the inner and out-
er worlds are somehow desirable? Certainly, illu-
sions are the product of evolution; we know that
several illusions occur because of shortcuts that
your brain takes to help you survive and thrive.
Some of your misperceptions allow you to make
lightning-fast assumptions that are technically
wrong but helpful in practice. They can help you
see the forest better—even if they make you dis-
cern the trees less precisely.
For example, you may underestimate or overes-
timate distances depending on various contextual
cues. The psychologists Russell E. Jackson and
Lawrence K. Cormack reported that when observ-
ers guessed the height of a cliff while looking
down from the top, their estimates were 32 per-
cent greater than when they were looking up from the cliff’s base. This dis-
crepancy appears related to the way we observe the same precipice from
above versus below: a vertiginous cliff edge falling away from us versus a
cliff face sloping into open land. Given that accidents are more likely to hap-
pen while climbing down rather than up, this height overestimation, when
you look down from the top, may make you descend cliffs with greater care,
reducing your chances of falling.
Illusions also offer a window into how our neural circuits create our sub-
jective experience of the world. The simulated reality your brain creates—
EXCERPTED FROM CHAMPIONS OF ILLUSION: THE SCIENCE BEHIND MIND -BOGGLING IMAGES AND MYSTIF YING BRAIN PUZZLES BY SUSANA MARTINEZ- CONDE AND STEPHEN MACKNIK.
PUBLISHED BY SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN / FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX. COPYRIGHT©2017 BY SUSANA MARTINEZ- CONDE AND STEPHEN L. MACKNIK. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
also known as your consciousness— becomes the
universe in which you live. It is the only thing you
have ever perceived. Your brain uses partial and
flawed information to build this mind model and
relies on quirky neural algorithms to alleviate
those flaws.
Because illusions enable us to see objects and
events that do not match physical reality, they are
critically important to understanding the neural
mechanisms of perception and cognition. They
expose the structure that our mental universe is
based on. To encourage the discovery and study
of illusions, we created the annual Best Illusion
of the Year Contest in 2005 to honor the best new
illusions from the previous year and celebrate the
inventiveness of illusion creators around the
world: researchers, software engineers, mathe-
maticians, magicians, graphic designers, sculp-
tors, and painters fascinated with mapping the
boundaries of human perception. The contest is
playful, but for scientists it serves a deeper pur-
pose. All the little perceptual hiccups that the contest showcases are
opportunities to peer behind the neurological curtain and learn how the
brain works. The contest has become an annual point of convergence for
visual artists and scientists, and an event that illusion creators of all
backgrounds look forward to, and prepare to compete in, every year. We
have been particularly thrilled that the contest has spurred the creation
and dissemination of new illusions that might otherwise remain undis-
covered and unknown. The following illusions are contest winners fea-
tured in our latest book Champions of Illusion.
27
Excerpt from Champions of Illusion

Birds in a Cage
By Martinez-Conde and Macknik Laboratories

When you stare at a color image, its afterimage takes on a shade of its
own. Afterimages are the consequence of a neural process called adapta-
tion, by which neurons decrease their responses to unchanging sensory
inputs. Once neurons have adapted, it takes a while for them to reset
to their previous, responsive state. It is during this period that illusory
afterimages appear. We see such images every day when we experience a
temporary dark spot in our field of vision after briefly looking at the sun
or at a bright lightbulb, or after being momentarily blinded by a camera
flash. Gazing at any colored surface can also induce a vivid afterimage of
the complementary color—that is, red versus green, or blue versus yellow.
Imagine staring at a red surface. The cells in your retina that respond to
red light will reduce their activity to save energy and to prepare them-
selves for detecting any future changes in redness. So, when you look The Spinning Disks Illusion

BARTON L. ANDERSON AND JONATHAN WINAWER NATURE

away to a white background, your retina remains adapted to the red envi-
ronment for a few seconds. With the red “subtracted” from the white, you
will see red’s opposite: green. To try it out, stare at the red parrot for 30
seconds, then immediately look at the center of the empty birdcage. You
should see a ghostly greenish parrot inside. Try the same with the green
cardinal, and you should see a pink bird. A similar illusion is part of an
exhibit at the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco.
By Johannes Zanker
Royal Holloway, University of London
2005 finalist
In the Spinning Disks Illusion, grayscale gradients in the shape of disks are
arranged in concentric circles that seem to spin slowly, instead of appearing
completely motionless—which they actually are! The illusion is caused by
involuntary eye movements: each eye motion moves the image onto a new
population of retinal photoreceptors. If you stare at the red central dot, care-
fully holding your eyes in place, the illusory motion will cease.

28
Excerpt from Champions of Illusion

Here Comes
the Sun
By Alan Stubbs
University of Maine
2006 finalist
Hold this book at a comfortable distance from
your eyes while looking at the picture. Then bring
the book gradually closer. As the image approach-
es, you should notice that its brightness seems to
increase. Move the book back and forth to make
the brightness increase and decrease repeatedly.
The neural bases of this effect are not yet under-
stood, but the explanation may reside in how our
visual system reacts to expanding versus contract-
ing objects as a function of their distance from the
observer. Some motion-sensitive neurons of the
visual pathway become selectively activated when
visual objects either loom (expand) or recede
(contract). It could be that the ghostly, transpar-
ent white cloud radiating from the center of the
image appears less salient to those neurons than
the highly visible red-blue background. If so,
when the cloud and the background expand and
contract together, your neurons may signal a dif-
ference in the relative amounts of expansion and

MICHAEL BAZILJEVICH SANSENES VIDUNDERLIGE VERDEN

contraction—so that one element appears to loom
or recede more than the other, even though no dif-
ference actually exists.

29
Excerpt from Champions of Illusion

The Coffer Illusion

By Anthony Norcia
Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute
2007 finalist

Information transmitted from the retina to the

brain is constrained by physical limitations, such
as the number of nerve fibers in the optic nerve
(about a million wires). If each of these fibers
were responsible for producing a pixel (a single
point in a digital image), you should have lower
resolution in your everyday vision than in the
images from your iPhone camera, but of course
this is not what we perceive. One way our visual
system overcomes these limitations—to present
us with the perception of a fully realized world,
despite the fundamental truth that our retinas
are low-resolution imaging devices—is by disre-
garding redundant features in objects and scenes.
Our brains preferentially extract, emphasize, and
process those unique components that are criti-
cal to identifying an object. Sharp discontinuities
in the contours of an object, such as corners, are
less redundant—and therefore more critical to
vision—because they contain more information
than straight edges or soft curves. The percep-
tual result is that corners are more salient than
non-corners. The Coffer Illusion contains 16
circles that are invisible at first sight, obscured by
the rectilinear shapes in the pattern. The illusion
may be due, at least in part, to the human brain’s
preoccupation with corners and angles.

P.U.TSE VISION RESEARCH

30
 Brett Frischmann is the Charles Widger Opinion
Endowed University Professor in Law, Business
and Economics at Villanova University. His latest
book is Re-Engineering Humanity (Cambridge
University Press 2018).

OBSERVATIONS

There’s Nothing
Wrong with
Being a Luddite
It enables critical reflection and evaluation
of the technological world we’re building

I
was recently called a Luddite. It was meant to be an
insult, to suggest that I was an anti-technology zeal-
ot. I resisted the temptation to defend my pro-tech
cred and instead explained the importance of Lud-
dites as a counterbalance to smart-tech utopianism.
Traditional Luddism involves “breaking technology”
or refusing “to participate in sociotechnical systems.”
Why bother? For some, it’s political resistance to dis-
ruptive technological innovation that threatens an
existing way of life. For others, it’s an ethical re-
sponse to the ways in which the technology affects critical reflection and evaluation of the world we have I am not saying we should destroy the IT systems at
personal or social relationships. In 1977, Langdon built and are building. At times, we need to break work and insist that everyone write memos in cursive
Winner went further and defended “epistemological away, to deconstruct the systems within which we on yellow notepads or etch them into stone tablets.
Luddism,” which involved decommissioning, disman- find ourselves embedded and to evaluate how the That isn’t what Luddism involves anyway. I’m calling
tling or withdrawing from a sociotechnical system to technologies we take for granted influence who we for people to exercise their freedom to be off and

GETTY IMAGES
learn about it and, more importantly, about how it are and can be. This is why some Luddism is import- while doing so, to reflect on and evaluate their rela-
affects individuals and society. ant for society. tionships to the digital networked technologies they
The good thing about Luddism is that enables We all should practice some Luddism in our lives. put aside or left behind.

31
 Opinion
Digital detox, as some have called it, can be a
powerful eye-opener, provided one is open to reflect-
ing on the experience. According to Michael Lachney
and Taylor Dotson in their recent paper in Social
Epistemology, after recovering from device withdraw-
al, detoxers begin to recognize the “substantial pat-
terning influence [digital tech has] on the character
of everyday life.” Digital detox can be a powerful
means for individuals to reevaluate their relationships
with digital tech.
But implicit throughout their discussion is the idea
that there is a practically exercisable freedom to be a
Luddite. It is worth considering what the structural pre-
conditions for such a freedom might be.
Power and environmental conditions matter. As
Lachney and Dotson acknowledge, “Rarely do individu-
als have any substantive say regarding which technol-
ogies come to shape their lives; they act within larger
sociotechnical structures not of their own choosing.”
People may choose brands and features and celebrate
the modern consumerist cornucopia e-commerce de-
livers, but autonomy often falters when people consid-
er withdrawal.
Modern society demands constant connection and
participation, which makes practicing Luddism increas-
ingly difficult. Forgoing Facebook invites social isola-
tion; leaving messages untended risks frustrating
bosses, spouses and, well, everyone else; being dis-
connected means missing out and being out of sync
with fast-moving memes and social discourse. It is, of
course, notoriously difficult to evaluate empirically the
degree to which social pressures determine tech
adoption and use.
The technological and social often seem insepara-
Whether and how
society can sustain
our freedom to be off
is one of the
foundational,
constitutional questions
of the 21st century.
ble. This is why Evan Selinger and I focus on tech-
no-social engineering of humans in Re-Engineering
Humanity. The “always on” world we’re building in-
volves techno-social engineering of both our lived-in
and experienced environments and our humanity,
simultaneously. Who we are and are capable of be-
ing is inextricably intertwined with our built world.
Thus, to protect Luddism, we need to engineer envi-
ronments that sustain our freedom to escape or to
be off.
Note that being a Luddite does not mean aban-
doning digital tech cold turkey. It is easy to tell peo-
ple to just stop using this or that tech. Delete Face-
book. Stop using GPS. Abandon your smartphone.
(Or at least leave it in the charging station in the
living room at night, please? That’s my household
rule.) But for many people, much of the time, these
suggestions are not practical given their current life-
styles and a host of economic, cultural and techno-
logical dependencies.
In the wake of the recent Facebook scandals,
including the Cambridge Analytica debacle, a move-
ment to delete Facebook accounts has gained some
traction. While some folks enjoy the freedom to do
so, many simply do not. Perhaps thousands or even
a hundred thousand people will delete their Face-
book accounts, but the overwhelming majority of
active Facebook users will not because they cannot,
at least not yet.
Many depend on Facebook to maintain connec-
tions with family and friends, to organize events, to
interact with co-workers, and so on. Until alterna-
tives for accomplishing those ends are available and
people see and experience how they can get on
without the tech they currently depend on, quitting
cold turkey just isn’t going to happen. Extreme pre-
scriptions make for good media and may sell books,
but deletion isn’t a serious solution.
Digital tech companies are marketing their own
“solutions”—for example, Apple’s Screen Time in iOS
12, Google’s Digital Wellbeing for Android, and hun-
dreds of productivity apps designed to help us curb
smartphone addiction. Their basic mantra that “there’s
an app for that” naively assumes and perpetuates the
erroneous but comforting belief that our problems are
fundamentally computational problems for which more
data and better algorithms is the best solution. This
digital tech solutionism only reinforces our depen-
dence on supposedly smart tech; we remain always
on—whether using the smartphone normally or using
the self-management app.
If you think you need an app to notify you that
you’re overusing your smartphone, think again. Don’t
give up on your own observational and social capabili-
ties; there are plenty of social cues to pay attention to.
32
 Opinion

And don’t give up on your social ties. Friends, family

members, and co-workers likely will understand and
hopefully join you. After all, you’ll need their help to
deal with the social pressures.
We need digital tech to be part of the solution, for
example, by eliminating addictive design practices,
shifting business models away from surveillance
capitalism, and even engineering friction into some
of our human-computer interactions. But outsourcing
Luddism to the digital tech industry is oxymoronic.
We need Luddism to thrive, but it depends upon
how we engineer our built environment and whether
we sustain our freedom to be off. Always-on digital
tech puts that freedom in general and Luddism in
particular at risk. In short, we need to leave room for
Luddites.
Whether and how society can sustain our free-
dom to be off is one of the foundational, constitu-
tional questions of the 21st century. Ironically, such
freedom must be engineered into the techno-social
environment. We need reflexive detoxification to be-
gin understanding how technology affects our hu-
manity. We need baselines and evaluation both on
and off the various technologies we use. The “al-
ways on” nature of supposedly smart sociotechnical
systems may deprive us of the opportunity to prac-
tice or even entertain the possible value of practic-
ing Luddism.

33
 Cindi May is a professor of psychology at the College of
Charleston. She explores avenues for improving cognitive
Opinion
function in college students, older adults and individuals with
intellectual disabilities. She is also an advocate for inclusive
opportunities for people with disabilities.

BEHAVIOR & SOCIETY

Life Advice:
Don’t Find
Your Passion
Study suggests meaningful work
can be something you grow into,
not something you discover

A
s a college professor, I have the privilege of
advising young women and men as they make
decisions about course selections, major areas
of study, and life directions. Like other college stu-
dents around the country, many of my advisees are
searching for content they find interesting and mean-
ingful, for work that is fulfilling and purposeful. Many
are eager to “find their passion.”
On the surface, these goals seem laudable. In-
stead of seeking power, status or personal wealth,
some students are motivated to discover their inter-
ests and uncover the path that excites and drives mistake. Rather than seek the one job or career path “fixed mindset” approach and search for the one, pre-
them. They want a career that lights their fire. Pre- that ignites our passion, we should invest meaningful- destined match in their lives. They expect this match
sumably they are adhering to the adage, “Do what ly in different interests and work to cultivate a pas- to be enduring, full of excitement, and endlessly ful-

GETTY IMAGES
you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” sion in one or more fields. By this view, interests are filling. Fixed mindsets have been observed with ro-
Recent research by investigators at Yale and nurtured over time, not discovered overnight. mantic relationships and intelligence. Individuals with
Stanford, however, suggests this approach might be a The key here is mindset. Some people adopt a “destiny” mindsets about romantic relationships often

34
 Opinion
seek “the one,” and tend to move on when faced with
relationship challenges. Individuals with fixed mind-
sets of intelligence believe that intelligence derives
from a fixed talent and cannot be cultivated or nur-
tured through experience. Across all these domains,
fixed mindsets tend to eschew the notion that explo-
ration and resilience can lead to positive change.
A fixed mindset about interests can be limiting in
two ways. First, it implies that our interests and tal-
ents may be narrow or specific. Once we find a path
that intrigues us and brings success, we may curb or
even abandon exploration of other potential interests.
Second, we may expect pursuit of our one true pas-
sion to be easy—after all, this is the pathway that will
provide endless drive and excitement, and will yield
the greatest achievement. Consequently, instead of
demonstrating resilience and perseverance in pursuit
of this passion, we may fold when faced with failure
or significant challenge. Difficulty may be perceived
as indication that we are simply on the wrong path.
By contrast, individuals with a “growth mindset”
believe that interests or passions can be developed
or cultivated through experience, investment, and
struggle. There is not a single, “right” path to be dis-
covered or revealed; instead, many different interests
are viable, even simultaneously. With a growth mind-
set, success in one arena doesn’t preclude or limit
exploration of other interests, nor does difficulty sig-
nal the need to change course.
Evidence from five experiments demonstrates that
mindsets significantly influence what we expect to
happen when pursuing our interests and how we re-
spond to new possibilities and challenges. In one
study, researchers first determined whether partici-
pants had a fixed or growth mindset about interests
using a simple questionnaire. This survey gauged the
extent to which individuals perceived interests to be
permanent, steadfast and static (fixed mindset), or
malleable, flexible and dynamic (growth mindset).
Participants then gave answers to several open-end-
ed questions concerning their expectations about
outcomes when pursuing a passionate interest. Rela-
tive to participants who expressed a growth mindset
about interests, those who expressed a fixed mindset
were far more likely to expect endless motivation and
minimal struggle when pursuing a confirmed passion.
Additional studies demonstrated that mindset in-
fluences more than expectations; mindset changes
behavior. In one paradigm, participants read two dif-
ferent articles, one that matched their personal goals
and pursuits, and one that did not. Participants rated
their interest in each article. When the article content
matched participants’ pursuits, having a fixed versus
growth mindset did not matter; everyone found the
matching article interesting. When the article content
mismatched participants’ pursuits, those with a fixed
mindset reported far less interest in the material than
those with a growth mindset. In other words, a fixed
mindset diminished curiosity about topics not directly
relevant to one’s primary pursuit.
Mindset also affected outcomes in the face of
difficulty. In a final study, participants first watched a
popular science film clip about black holes, and rated
their interest in the clip. Most found it fascinating.
Those expressing high interest in black holes after
viewing the film then read a complex technical report
on black holes. They rated both how difficult and how
interesting they found the report. Among those who
found the technical report difficult to read, those with
a fixed mindset subsequently expressed far less in-
terest in black holes than those with a growth mind-
set. These findings suggest that when individuals with
a fixed mindset pursue an emerging interest, they are
more likely to lose interest in that topic if it becomes
challenging.
On the bright side, a fixed mindset about interests
may have its benefits. It may foster a single-minded-
ness that reduces distraction and promotes comple-
tion of a task. Assuming an individual faces minimal
frustration when pursuing a passion, a fixed mindset
may promote contentment and prevent endless con-
sideration of alternative interests.
A fixed mindset about interests is likely to be a
hazard, however, when advances within one’s field
require the integration of broad and diverse knowl-
edge sets, or when resilience is needed in facing new
hurdles. For these reasons, college students would be
wise to enroll in a variety of courses and to seek an
array of experiential learning opportunities, including
those that stretch them out of their comfort zones.
Rather than searching for their one true passion, they
should understand that interests, expertise, and even
passion can be cultivated through experience, per-
sistence, and hard work.
35
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